| Neil Turok | |
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(circa 1990) |
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| Born | 1958 (age 53–54) Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Residence | Waterloo, Ontario Canada |
| Alma mater | Churchill College, Cambridge Imperial College London |
| Known for | Hawking-Turok instanton solutions African Institute for Mathematical Sciences |
Neil Geoffrey Turok (born 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is the Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.[1] He is the son of Mary and Ben Turok, activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress.
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After graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge, Turok gained his doctorate from Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Professor David Olive, one of the inventors of superstring theory. After a postdoctoral post at Santa Barbara, he was an associate scientist at Fermilab, Chicago. In 1992 he was awarded the Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University, then held the Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge starting in 1997. He was appointed Director of the Perimeter Institute in 2008.
Turok has worked in a number of areas of mathematical physics and early universe physics, focusing on observational tests of fundamental physics in cosmology. In the early 1990s, his group showed how the polarisation and temperature anisotropies of the cosmic background radiation would be correlated, a prediction which has been confirmed in detail by recent precision measurements by the WMAP spacecraft. They also developed a key test for the presence of a cosmological constant, also recently confirmed. Turok and collaborators developed the theory of open inflation. With Stephen Hawking, he later developed the so-called Hawking-Turok instanton solutions which, according to the no-boundary proposal of Hawking and James Hartle, can describe the birth of an inflationary universe.
Most recently, with Paul Steinhardt at Princeton, Turok has been developing a cyclic model for the universe, in which the big bang is explained as a collision between two "brane-worlds" in M theory. The predictions of this model are in agreement with current cosmological data, but there are interesting differences with the predictions of cosmological inflation which will be probed by future experiments (probably by Planck (spacecraft)). In 2006, Steinhardt and Turok showed how the cyclic model could naturally incorporate a mechanism for relaxing the cosmological constant to very small values, consistent with current observations. Steinhardt and Turok co-authored the recent popular science book "Endless Universe".
In 2003, Turok founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, a postgraduate educational centre supporting the development of mathematics and science across the African continent.
He was awarded the 2008 TED Prize for his work in mathematical physics and in establishing the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg.[2] He also received a "Most Innovative People Award," for Social Innovation, at the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WSIE) in 2008. [3]
On May 9, 2008 Mike Lazaridis announced that Turok would become the new Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics starting on October 1, 2008.
On June 14, 2011 Turok received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Ottawa. [4]
On November 3, 2011 Turok was selected to deliver the Massey Lectures for the 2012 season. This honor involves five separate lectures to be delivered in various locations across Canada in October of 2012, aired on CBC's Ideas (radio show) shortly thereafter. The prestigious Massey Lectures have become an annual highlight of Canada's national intellectual life over the past 50 years.[5]